The action body

The action body

Chapter:

(p.37)
Chapter 2 The action body

Source:

Contemporary Action Cinema

Author(s):

Lisa Purse

Publisher:

Edinburgh University Press

DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638178.003.0003

Illustrating the action film's persistent focus on the exerting body, this chapter asks how we can more precisely account for the viewer's experience of action cinema, and speci?cally his or her engagement with on-screen action bodies, and investigates how those on-screen bodies generate meaning. Using Casino Royale as an extended case study, the chapter shows how the action movie stages the body in ways which achieve a viscerally felt sense of physical effort, and draws on phenomenological film theory to account for the ways in which the spectator ‘fleshes out’ what he or she sees onscreen and the consequences of that fleshing out for meaning and interpretation.

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